Pigs are the closest to humans in their response to food, so the best way to test the unsaturated vegetable oils as food would be to test them on pigs. But that would cost too much, so the salesmen persuaded the pig farmers to try out this new "super food" for pigs. I have a sneaky admiration for that sales job!

The farmers were delighted because unsaturated vegetable oils made pigs put on weight explosively, and they were obese enough to slaughter much sooner, so they didn't require as much food.  That seemed to make unsaturated vegetable oils perfect for pigs, but not for humans who wanted to stay slim.

Then the problems started. Pigs would die of cancer or heart attack before they could be slaughtered. So that market closed down. Do you remember what I said about pigs giving results closest to humans?

Growth of Heart Attacks

The first recorded heart attack was in Britain in 1878. In the early 1900s Dr Dudley White (referred to as the founder of cardiology) said that he wanted to find out more about the new disease reported in European medical literature, but he had to wait until 1921 before he met his first heart attack patient.

As the market for unsaturated oils continued to expand heart attacks and cancer became the second and third (medical "mistakes" kill most people) major causes of death and obesity has become an epidemic as saturated fat use dropped from 30gm per day to about 3gm per day. The pig farmers could have warned us!

Lies to Increase Market

You may be old enough to remember the start of some of these lies.

1. You can't tell butter from margarine.
2. Unsaturated oils are healthy for you
3. Saturated fats are deadly for you
4. High cholesterol is caused by saturated fats and will kill you.

A couple of decades ago the researcher who was originally bribed to invent the cholesterol myth confessed his part in it. Margarine has been shown to be loaded with trans fatty acids that can kill you. Unsaturated oils cause heart attacks but saturated fats are good for you and help you lose weight. Think about it! How much unsaturated oil would our ancestors have eaten? They used to pig out on animal fats.

Suppression of Evidence

The main article mentioned in the resources box describes a deliberate policy to  suppress the evidence. After all, if you owned a branch of the media would you want to lose your main advertisers just because you exposed their lies?

Cellular Damage
Unsaturated oils are drying oils. That means that they harden when exposed to oxygen, whether it is in putty, or varnish, or your blood stream.
Our ancestors lived on a diet high in saturated fats. Dr Yamori reported that rats given high cholesterol and saturated fat diets had fewer strokes. Saturated fats don't produce free radicals, so antioxidants were not as necessary to our ancestors as they are in today's diets.
The membranes round the cells in our body are mostly fat. Saturated fats are C shaped and interlock to produce a strong membrane. Unsaturated oils are straight so don't lock together, so weaker membranes are produced, more open to infection.
Perhaps you don't mind getting obese? If you take drugs to lower the amount of cholesterol produced by your liver you are 5% more likely to die of cancer. But that isn't what worries me most.

Our brains are largely made up of cholesterol so Americans are becoming more stupid as they restrict the amount of cholesterol in their blood. Now that does worry me. I can be stupid enough without any help from interference with my cholesterol.

Suggested Solution

Before I mention a possible solution consider the bogus research results described by the media. One research report showed that saturated fats help you slim, and unsaturated fats make you gain weight. The media reported it as proving the opposite, which is the story that everyone hears.

Coconut is a special saturated fat. Unlike animal fats, coconut oil has short-chain molecules. As it happens these short chains can be burned for energy, and your body uses some of the long-chain fats to add fuel to the fire, so you actually lose weight.

That isn't why coconut oil was banned for a few years. The vegetable oil manufacturers saw it as competition and did some spurious research to "prove" that it was dangerous to health. The ban was removed when their arguments fell through.

Even olive oil, the safest of unsaturated vegetable oils becomes toxic when heated too much, so although you can pour it over your salads you shouldn't use it in your cooking. Coconut oil doesn't have this problem.

Some chemically extracted coconut oil tastes vile, so you should shop around for a cold-pressed version.

What I've done is to replace all my unsaturated vegetable oils with coconut oil, and I've lost weight. Other people have lost weight the same way. Of course, the pig farmers could have told us that, and I wish they had blown the whistle a hundred years ago.